Beautiful, bespoke eCommerce stores designed and developed in-house on Shopify

7 years of commercial Shopify experience

As Shopify experts, we design & develop completely bespoke Shopify websites for our clients. We work in fashion, cosmetics, healthcare, food & drink and home & leisure - as well as a number of other competitive spaces.

Design

We're known for our clean, elegant design sensibilities and we've won numerous design awards to support this over the years. We appreciate that with an eCommerce website, it has to achieve two very clear objectives. Inspire brand advocacy and convert users into transactional customers. Not only should a website look great across all devices sizes, it's also got to provide an easy, repeatable route to sale.

Development

We're confident that our high standard of web development sets us apart from other agencies. We pay close attention to clean, semantic page structures and the latest in in-browser technology, applying them creatively to our work. This means that our websites work perfectly and look great on launch and they'll stand the test of time. It's not uncommon for our clients to far surpass industry statistics for average site life expectancy - which we know puts value for money at the centre of our service.

Performance

Shopify is a powerful, completely hosted solution - so you know that you'll always be getting top quality performance out of the box. Having said that, there's still a huge difference between a well considered, semantically structured website, and one that's been put together using outdated techniques. Once a build is finalised, we also make sure to optimise in-page imagery with clever compression technology - as every second counts (not just for your visitors, but your ranking in search engine results pages too).

SEO

As with all of our websites, SEO is considered throughout the entirety of the process. Optimising for search engines should never be an afterthought. It's about good, original content that is specific to your business, market sector and aligned with your objectives. Couple great content with a well-structured codebase and this baseline will prove successful with an effective, post-launch marketing strategy.

Our process

Our planning, design and development rounds have been honed over hundreds of successful web projects - and our process is responsible for results we stand by. We plan, design and develop eCommerce sites for clients that know that every part of their customer's digital experience is important.

01. Planning & strategy

All of our web design and development projects are started with a thorough planning round. We work with our clients to get to the heart of their business challenges - not just their digital ones - and make sure that our design, development and launch rounds are all fed with the right information up front. Collaboration is key - and we expect to be immersed in our client strategies in order to deliver the best value.

02. Visual design

Visual design is a collaborative, transparent round of work that sees our creative team working with our client teams to deliver visual work that reflects the project's brief, proposal and goals. Our approach to visual design is considered, clear and iterative and we don't move to development until the design work hits the mark exactly.

03. Development & integration

Our developers are responsible for working with our designers and our client teams to implement both the creative front-end and nailing down the functionality on the back-end. We make sure that our technical team are unified around the project's technical goals and requirements, and then we share our progress as the site comes together. We'll also work on data migration and any other external services we need to factor in before our designers work with our developers to make sure everything's pixel perfect - and then we move on to the testing and launch phase.

04. Testing & launch

All of our sites, stores and digital products are put through a rigorous testing process to make sure that they're functional, robust and provide an outstanding experience, regardless of the device size or platform. We make sure that our products are tested both functionally and across different browsers - and in parallel to that, work with our clients to decide exactly how we're going to successfully go live.

Apps & integrations

Sometimes, vanilla Shopify isn't quite enough to get the job done. The good news - and there's plenty - is that Shopify's rich app ecosystem means that there's a whole banquet of brilliant apps, extensions and integrations that put the platform (and your business) into overdrive.

Dedicated Shopify apps

The Shopify app community is full of ingenious, creative apps that help add powerful new features to a standard Shopify installation. It's this inventive approach to both free and paid apps that put the power of the community into the hands of any ambitious merchant.

Third-party integrations

More often than not, your sales operations extend beyond the website into sophisticated warehousing, CRM or order management systems that get your orders fulfilled and out to your customers. Whether it's inventory management, custom middleware, warehousing or supplier integration, we've seen it all - and are on hand to help write stable, secure connections to the beating heart of your business.

Client happiers

We have recently migrated from Demandware to Shopify Plus and selected BAO as our design and integration agency. BAO impressed us from the start with their speedy grasp of our business needs. The team at BAO have a very thorough knowledge of Shopify and Shopify Plus. They were under pressure to deliver 4 new Shopify stores for us within a very short time period. Not only did they achieve this but actually had the sites ready a day before the go live date. Start to finish the project took less than 3 months.

Clare Dixey - Head of eCommerce @ Cambridge Satchel Co

One word - Legends. This project was not straight forward and they embraced the challenge with enormous professionalism. BAO are brilliant communicators and collaborators which meant that we felt involved and were able to consult throughout the development process. Not once did we have that feeling of being left in the dark. They are great problem solvers as well - if we hit a hurdle they found a way over it. Clear (and agreed) objectives and project plan which was adhered to and no budget creep. And distance was no barrier either - in fact the UK/Australia time difference made the process even more productive.

Jacki Smith - Owner & My Name Label

The By Association Only team went over and above to ensure that our project was executed in line with our desired timeline, designed immaculately and was a perfect representation of our brand. They continue to provide support and offer helpful advice and we've already embarked on our next project with them. I couldn't recommend them highly enough.

Emma Pull - Digital Director @ Anna Clothing

Hands down, the best agency experience we have had. We quickly identified 'By Association Only' as the one we wanted to work with and we made the right choice! They excelled in every area of this project. As with all these projects, the back and forth and collaboration help to produce the best possible end result, and By Association Only were a dream to work with. Always understanding our feedback, and always coming back with a better solution. Finally, post-launch they don't disappear but stay live on the site to iron out any little bugs or tweaks that are needed.